A discussion on how IT operators are seeking increased automation, built-in intelligence, and robust security as they look for turnkey hyperconverged appliance approaches for both cloud and traditional workloads.

Gardner: What’s driving the need to solve hybrid IT complexity at HudsonAlpha?

Mullican: The big drivers at HudsonAlpha are the requirements for data locality and ease-of-adoption. We produce about 6 petabytes of new data every year, and that rate is increasing with every project that we do.

Gardner: Do you find that having multiple types of IT platforms, environments, and architectures creates a level of complexity that’s increasingly difficult to manage?

Mullican: Gaining a competitive edge requires adopting new approaches to hybrid IT. Even carefully contained shadow ITis a great way to develop new approaches and attain breakthroughs.

Gardner: You want to give people enough leash where they can go and roam and experiment, but perhaps not so much that you don’t know where they are, what they are doing.

Software-defined everything

Mullican: Right. “Software-defined everything” is our mantra. That’s what we aim to do at HudsonAlpha for gaining rapid innovation.

Gardner: How do you gain balance from too hard-to-manage complexity, with a potential of chaos, to the point where you can harness and optimize -- yet allow for experimentation, too?

Mullican: IT is ultimately responsible for the security and the up-time of the infrastructure. So it’s important to have a good framework on which the developers and the researchers can compute. It’s about finding a balance between letting them have provisioning access to those resources versus being able to keep an eye on what they are doing. And not only from a usage perspective, but from a cost perspective, too.

Simplified

Gardner: Tell us about HudsonAlpha and its fairly extreme IT requirements.

Mullican: HudsonAlpha is a nonprofit organization of entrepreneurs, scientists, and educators who apply the benefits of genomics to everyday life. We also provide IT services and support for about 40 affiliate companies on our 150-acre campus in Huntsville, Alabama.

Gardner: What about the IT requirements? How you fulfill that mandate using technology?

Mullican: We produce 6 petabytes of new data every year. We have millions of hours of compute processing time running on our infrastructure. We have hardware acceleration. We have direct connections to clouds. We have collaboration for our researchers that extends throughout the world to external organizations. We use containers, and we use multiple cloud providers.

Gardner: So you have been doing multi-cloud before there was even a word for multi-cloud?

Mullican: We are the hybrid-scale and hybrid IT organization that no one has ever heard of.

Gardner: Let’s unpack some of the hurdles you need to overcome to keep all of your scientists and researchers happy. How do you avoid lock-in? How do you keep it so that you can remain open and competitive?

Agnostic arrangements of clouds

Mullican: It’s important for us to keep our local datacenters agnostic, as well as our private and public clouds. So we strive to communicate with all of our resources through application programming interfaces (APIs), and we use open-source technologies at HudsonAlpha. We are proud of that. Yet there are a lot of possibilities for arranging all of those pieces.

There are a lot [of services] that you can combine with the right toolsets, not only in your local datacenter but also in the clouds. If you put in the effort to write the code with that in mind -- so you don’t lock into any one solution necessarily -- then you can optimize and put everything together.

Gardner: Because you are a nonprofit institute, you often seek grants. But those grants can come with unique requirements, even IT use benefits and cloud choice considerations.

Cloud cost control, granted

Mullican: Right. Researchers are applying for grants throughout the year, and now with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), when grants are awarded, they come with community cloud credits, which is an exciting idea for the researchers. It means they can immediately begin consuming resources in the cloud -- from storage to compute -- and that cost is covered by the grant.

So they are anxious to get started on that, which brings challenges to IT. We certainly don’t want to be the holdup for that innovation. We want the projects to progress as rapidly as possible. At the same time, we need to be aware of what is happening in a cloud and not lose control over usage and cost.

Simplified

Gardner: Certainly HudsonAlpha is an extreme test bed for multi-cloud management, with lots of different systems, changing requirements, and the need to provide the flexibility to innovate to your clientele. When you wanted a better management capability, to gain an overview into that full hybrid IT environment, how did you come together with HPE and test what they are doing?

The key is: How do we rapidly provision those resources in an automated fashion? I think the key there is not only for IT to be aware of those resources, but for developers to be as well. We have groups of developers dealing with bioinformatics at HudsonAlpha. They can benefit from all of the different types of infrastructure in our datacenter. What HPE OneSphere does is enable them to access -- through a common API -- that infrastructure. So it’s very exciting.

Gardner: What did HPE OneSphere bring to the table for you in order to be able to rationalize, visualize, and even prioritize this very large mixture of hybrid IT assets?

Mullican: We have been beta testing HPE OneSphere since October 2017, and we have tied it into our VMware ESX Server environment, as well as our Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment successfully -- and that’s at an IT level. So our next step is to give that to researchers as a single pane of glass where they can go and provision the resources themselves.

Gardner: What this might capability bring to you and your organization?

Cross-training the clouds

Mullican: We want to do more with cross-cloud. Right now we are very adept at provisioning within our datacenters, provisioning within each individual cloud. HudsonAlpha has a presence in all the major public clouds -- AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure. But the next step would be to go cross-cloud, to provision applications across them all.

For example, you might have an application that runs as a series of microservices. So you can have one microservice take advantage of your on-premises datacenter, such as for local storage. And then another piece could take advantage of object storage in the cloud. And even another piece could be in another separate public cloud.

But the key here is that our developer and researchers -- the end users of OneSphere – they don’t need to know all of the specifics of provisioning in each of those environments. That is not a level of expertise in their wheelhouse. In this new OneSphere way, all they know is that they are provisioning the application in the pipeline -- and that’s what the researchers will use. Then it’s up to us in IT to come along and keep an eye on what they are doing through the analytics that HPE OneSphere provides.

Gardner: Because OneSphere gives you the visibility to see what the end users are doing, potentially, for cost optimization and remaining competitive, you may be able to play one cloud off another. You may even be able to automate and orchestrate that.

Simplified

Mullican: Right, and that will be an ongoing effort to always optimize cost -- but not at the risk of slowing the research. We want the research to happen, and to innovate as quickly as possible. We don’t want to be the holdup for that. But we definitely do need to loop back around and keep an eye on how the different clouds are being used and make decisions going forward based on the analytics.

Gardner: There may be other organizations that are going to be more cost-focused, and they will probably want to dial back to get the best deals. It’s nice that we have the flexibility to choose an algorithmic approach to business, if you will.

Mullican: Right. The research that we do at HudsonAlpha saves lives and the utmost importance is to be able to conduct that research at the fastest speed.

Gardner: HPE OneSphere seems geared toward being cloud-agnostic. They are beginning on AWS, yet they are going to be adding more clouds. And they are supporting more internal private cloud infrastructures, and using an API-driven approach to microservices and containers.

The research that we do at HudsonAlpha saves lives, and the utmost importance is to be able to conduct the research at the fastest speed.

As an early tester, and someone who has been a long-time user of HPE infrastructure, is there anything about the combination of HPE Synergy, HPE SimpliVity HCI, and HPE 3PAR intelligent storage -- in conjunction with OneSphere -- that’s given you a "whole greater than the sum of the parts" effect?

Mullican: HPE Synergy and composable infrastructure is something that is very near and dear to me. I have a lot of hours invested with HPE Synergy Image Streamer and customizing open-source applications on Image Streamer -– open-source operating systems and applications.

The ability to utilize that in the mix that I have architected natively with OneSphere -- in addition to the public clouds -- is very powerful, and I am excited to see where that goes.

Gardner: Any words of wisdom to others who may be have not yet gone down this road? What do you advise others to consider as they are seeking to better compose, automate, and optimize their infrastructure?

Get adept at DevOps

Mullican: It needs to start with IT. IT needs to take on more of a DevOps approach.

As far as putting an emphasis on automation -- and being able to provision infrastructure in the datacenter and the cloud through automated APIs -- a lot of companies probably are still slow to adopt that. They are still provisioning in older methods, and I think it’s important that they do that. But then, once your IT department is adept with DevOps, your developers can begin feeding from that and using what IT has laid down as a foundation. So it needs to start with IT.

It involves a skill set change for some of the traditional system administrators and network administrators. But now, with software-defined networking (SDN) and with automated deployments and provisioning of resources -- that’s a skill set that IT really needs to step up and master. That’s because they are going to need to set the example for the developers who are going to come along and be able to then use those same tools.

That’s the partnership that companies really need to foster -- and it’s between IT and developers. And something like HPE OneSphere is a good fit for that, because it provides a unified API.

On one hand, your IT department can be busy mastering how to communicate with their infrastructure through that tool. And at the same time, they can be refactoring applications as microservices, and that’s up to the developer teams. So both can be working on all of this at the same time.

Then when it all comes together with a service catalog of options, in the end it’s just a simple interface. That’s what we want, to provide a simple interface for the researchers. They don’t have to think about all the work that went into the infrastructure, they are just choosing the proper workflow and pipeline for future projects.

We want to provide a simple interface to the researchers. They don't have to think about all the work that went into the infrastructure.

Gardner: It also sounds, Katreena, like you are able to elevate IT to a solutions-level abstraction, and that OneSphere is an accelerant to elevating IT. At the same time, OneSphere is an accelerant to the adoption of DevOps, which means it’s also elevating the developers. So are we really finally bringing people to that higher plane of business-focus and digital transformation?

HCI advances across the globe

Mullican: Yes. HPE OneSphere is an advantage to both of those departments, which in some companies can be still quite disparate. Now at HudsonAlpha, we are DevOps in IT. It’s not a distinguished department, but in some companies that’s not the case.

And I think we have a lot of advantages because we think in terms of automation, and we think in terms of APIs from the infrastructure standpoint. And the tools that we have invested in, the types of composable and hyperconverged infrastructure, are helping accomplish that.

Gardner: I speak with a number of organizations that are global, and they have some data sovereignty concerns. I’d like to explore, before we close out, how OneSphere also might be powerful in helping to decide where data sets reside in different clouds, private and public, for various regulatory reasons.

Is there something about having that visibility into hybrid IT that extends into hybrid data environments?

Mullican: Data locality is one of our driving factors in IT, and we do have on-premises storage as well as cloud storage. There is a time and a place for both of those, and they do not always mix, but we have requirements for our data to be available worldwide for collaboration.

So, the services that HPE OneSphere makes available are designed to use the appropriate data connections, whether that would be back to your object storage on-premises, or AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), for example, in the cloud.

Hybrid hard work pays off

Mullican: It is a good fit for hybrid IT and what we do at HudsonAlpha. It’s a natural addition to all of the preparation work that we have done in IT around automated provisioning with HPE Synergy and Image Streamer.

HPE OneSphere is a way to showcase to the end user all of the efforts that have been, and are being, done by IT. That’s why it’s a satisfying tool to implement, because, in the end, you want what you have worked on so hard to be available to the researchers and be put to use easily and quickly.

The next BriefingsDirect developer productivity insights interview explores how a South African insurance innovator has built a modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) IT environment that replicates databases so fast that developers can test and re-test to their hearts’ content.

Gardner: What have been the top trends driving your interest in modernizing your data replication capabilities?

Steyn: One of the challenges we had was the business was really flying blind. We had to create a platform and the ability to get data out of the production environment as quickly as possible to allow the business to make informed decisions -- literally in almost real-time.

Gardner: What were some of the impediments to moving data and creating these new environments for your developers and your operators?

How to solve key challenges

Steyn: We literally had to copy databases across the network and onto new environments, and that was very time consuming. It literally took us two to three days to get a new environment up and running for the developers. You would think that this would be easy -- like replication. It proved to be quite a challenge for us because there are vast amounts of data. But the whole HCI approach just eliminated all of those challenges.

Gardner: One of the benefits of going at the infrastructure level for such a solution is not only do you solve one problem-- but you probably solve multiple ones; things like replication and deduplication become integrated into the environment. What were some of the extended benefits you got when you went to a hyperconverged environment?

Time, Storage Savings

Steyn: Deduplication was definitely one of our bigger gains. We have had six to eight development teams, and I literally had an identical copy of our production environment for each of them that they used for testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and things like that.

Steyn

At any point in time, we had at least 10 copies of our production environment all over the place. And if you don’t dedupe at that level, you need vast amounts of storage. So that really was a concern for us in terms of storage.

Gardner: Of course, business agility often hinges on your developers’ productivity. When you can tell your developers, “Go ahead, spin up; do what you want,” that can be a great productivity benefit.

Steyn: We literally had daily fights between the IT operations and infrastructure guys and the developers because they were needed resources and we just couldn’t provide them with those resources. And it was not because we didn’t have resources at hand, but it was just the time to spin it up, to get to the guys to configure their environments, and things like that.

It was literally a three- to four-day exercise to get an environment up and running. For those guys who are trying to push the agile development methodology, in a two-week sprint, you can’t afford to lose two or three days.

Gardner: You don’t want to be in a scrum where they are saying, “You have to wait three or four days.” It doesn’t work.

Steyn: No, it doesn’t, definitely not.

Gardner: Tell us about King Price. What is your organization like for those who are not familiar with it?

As your vehicle depreciates, so does your monthly insurance premium. That has been our biggest selling point.

Steyn: King Price initially started off as a short-term insurance company about five years ago in Pretoria. We have a unique, one-of-a-kind business model. The short of it is that as your vehicle’s value depreciates, so does your monthly insurance premium. That has been our biggest selling point.

We see ourselves as disruptive. But there are also a lot of other things disrupting the short-term insurance industry in South Africa -- things like Uber and self-driving cars. These are definitely a threat in the long term for us.

It’s also a very competitive industry in South Africa. Sowe have been rapidly launching new businesses. We launched commercial insurance recently. We launched cyber insurance. Sowe are really adopting new business ventures.

How to solve key challenges

Gardner: And, of course, in any competitive business environment, your margins are thin; you have to do things efficiently. Were there any other economic benefits to adopting a hyperconverged environment, other than developer productivity?

Steyn: On the data center itself, the amount of floor space that you need, the footprint, is much less with hyperconverged. It eliminates a lot of requirements in terms of networking, switching, and storage. The ease of deployment in and of itself makes it a lot simpler.

On the business side, we gained the ability to have more data at-hand for the guys in the analytics environment and the ratings environment. They can make much more informed decisions, literally on the fly, if they need to gear-up for a call center, or to take on a new marketing strategy, or something like that.

Gardner: It’s not difficult to rationalize the investment to go to hyperconverged.

Worth the HCI Investment

Steyn: No, it was actually quite easy. I can’t imagine life or IT without the investment that we’ve made. I can’t see how we could have moved forward without it.

Gardner: Give our audience a sense of the scale of your development organization. How many developers do you have? How many teams? What numbers of builds do you have going on at any given time?

Steyn: It’s about 50 developers, or six to eight teams, depending on the scale of the projects they are working on. Each development team is focused on a specific unit within the business. They do two-week sprints, and some of the releases are quite big.

It means getting the product out to the market as quickly as possible, to bring new functionality to the business. We can’t afford to have a piece of product stuck in a development hold for six to eight weeks because, by that time, you are too late.

Gardner: Let’s drill down into the actual hyperconverged infrastructure you have in place. What did you look at? How did you make a decision? What did you end up doing?

Steyn: We had initially invested in Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity 3400 cubes for our development space, and we thought that would pretty much meet our needs. Prior to that, we had invested in traditional blades and storage infrastructure. We were thinking that we would stay with that for the production environment, and the SimpliVity systems would be used for just the development environments.

The gains we saw were just so big ... Now we have the entire environment running on SimpliVity cubes.

But the gains we saw in the development environment were just so big that we very quickly made a decision to get additional cubes and deploy them as the production environment, too. And it just grew from there. Sowe now have the entire environment running on SimpliVity cubes.

We still have some traditional storage that we use for archiving purposes, but other than that, it’s 100 percent HPE SimpliVity.

Gardner: What storage environment do you associate with that to get the best benefits?

Keep Storage Simple

Steyn: We are currently using the HPE 3PAR storage, and it’s working quite well. We have some production environments running there; a lot of archiving uses for that. It’s still very complementary to our environment.

Gardner: A lot of organizations will start with HCI in something like development, move it toward production, but then they also extend it into things like data warehouses, supporting their data infrastructure and analytics infrastructure. Has that been the case at King Price?

Steyn: Yes, definitely. We initially began with the development environment, and we thought that’s going to be it. We very soon adopted HCI into the production environments. And it was at that point where we literally had an entire cube dedicated to the enterprise data warehouse guys. Those are the teams running all of the modeling, pricing structures, and things like that. HCI is proving to be very helpful for them as well, because those guys, they demand extreme data performance, it’s scary.

How to solve key challenges

Gardner: I have also seen organizations on a slippery slope, that once they have a certain critical mass of HCI, they begin thinking about an entire software-defined data center (SDDC). They gain the opportunity to entirely mirror data centers for disaster recovery, and for fast backup and recovery security and risk avoidance benefits. Are you moving along that path as well?

Steyn: That’s a project that we launched just a few months ago. We are redesigning our entire infrastructure. We are going to build in the ease of failover, the WAN optimization, and the compression. It just makes a lot more sense to just build a second active data center. So that’s what we are busy doing now, and we are going to deploy the next-generation technology in that data center.

Gardner: Is there any point in time where you are going to be experimenting more with cloud, multi-cloud, and then dealing with a hybrid IT environment where you are going to want to manage all of that? We’ve recently heard news from HPE about OneSphere. Any thoughts about how that might relate to your organization?

Cloud Common Sense

Steyn: Yes, in our engagement with Microsoft, for example, in terms of licensing of products, this is definitely something we have been talking about. Solutions like HPE OneSphere are definitely going to make a lot of sense in our environment.

There are a lot of workloads that we can just pass onto the cloud that we don’t need to have on-premises, at least on a permanent basis. Even the guys from our enterprise data warehouse, there are a lot of jobs that every now and then they can just pass off to the cloud. Something like HPE OneSphere is definitely going to make that a lot easier for us.

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Gardner: What challenges are mobile and telecom operators now facing as they transition to becoming managed service providers?

Oriol Barat: The main challenge we face at this moment is to help customers navigate in a multi-cloud environment. We now have local platforms, some legacy, some virtualized platforms, hyperscale public cloud providers, and data communications networks. We want to help our customers manage these in a secure way.

Gardner: How have your cloud services evolved? How have partnerships allowed you to enter new markets to quickly provide services?

Oriol Barat

Oriol Barat: We have had to transition from being a hosting provider with data centers in many countries. Our movement to cloud was a natural evolution of those hosting services. As a telecommunications company (telco), our main business is shared networks, and the network is a shared asset between many customers. So when we thought about the hosting business, we similarly wanted to be able to have shared assets. VMware, with its virtualization technology, came as a natural partner to help us evolve our hosting services.

Gardner: Joe, it’s as if you designed the VMware stack with customers such as Telefonica in mind.

Baguley: You could say that, yes. The vision has always been for us at VMware to develop what was originally called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Now, with multi-cloud, for me, it’s an operating system (OS) for clouds.

Baguley

We’re bringing together storage, networking and compute into one OS that can run both on-premises and off-premises. You could be running on-premises the same OS as someone like Telefonica is running for their public cloud -- meaning that you have a common operating environment, a common infrastructure.

So, yes, entirely, it was built as part of this vision that everyone runs this OS to build his or her clouds.

Gardner: To have a core, common infrastructure -- yet have the ability to adapt on top of that for localized markets -- is the best of all worlds.

Baguley: That’s entirely it. Like someone said, “If all of the clouds are running the same OS, what’s the differentiation?” Well, the differentiation is, you want to go with the biggest player in Latin America. You want to go with the player that has the best direct connections: The guys that can give you service levels maybe that the cloud providers can’t give. They can give you over-the-top services that other cloud providers don’t provide. They can give you an integrated solution for your business that includes the cloud -- and other enterprise services.

It’s about providing the tools for cloud providers to build differentiated powerful clouds for their customers.

Gardner: Antonio, please, for those of our listeners and readers that aren’t that familiar with Telefonica, tell us about the breadth and depth of your company.

Oriol Barat:Telefonica is one of the top 10 global telco providers in the world. We are in 21 countries. We have fixed and mobile data services, and now we are in the process of digital transformation, where we have our focus in four areas: cloud, security, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data.

We used to think that our core business was in communications. Now we see what we call a new core of our business at the intersection of data communications, cloud, and security. We think this is really the foundation, the platform, of all the services that come on top.

Gardner: And, of course, we would all like to start with brand-new infrastructure when we enter markets. But as you know, we have to deal with what is already in place, too. When it came time for you to come up with the right combination of vendors, the right combination of technologies, to produce your new managed services capabilities, why did you choose HPE and VMware to create this full solution?

Sharing requires trust

Oriol Barat: VMware was our natural choice with its virtualization technologies to start providing shared IT platforms -- even before cloud, as a word, was invented. We launched “virtual hosting” in 2007. That was 10 years ago, and since then we have been evolving from this virtual hosting that had no portal but was a shared platform for customers, to the cloud services that we have today.

The hardware part is important; we have to have reliable and powerful technology. For us, it’s very important to provide trust to the customers. Trust, because what they are running in their data centers is similar to what we have in our data centers. Having VMware and HPE as partners provides this trust to the customers so that they will move the applications, and they know it will work fine.

Gardner: HPE is very fond of its Synergy platform, with composable infrastructure. How did that help you and VMware pull together the full solution for Telefonica, Joe?

Baguley: We have been on this journey together, as Antonio mentioned, since 2007 -- since before cloud was a thing. We don’t have a test environment that’s as big as Telefonica’s production environment -- and neither does HPE. What we have been doing is working together -- and like any of these journeys, there have been missteps along the way. We stumbled occasionally, but it’s been good to work together as a partnership.

As we have grown, we have also both understood how the requirements of the market are changing and evolving. Ten years ago providing a combined cloud platform on a composable infrastructure was unheard of -- and people wouldn’t believe you could do it. But that’s what we have evolved together, with the work that we have done with companies such as Telefonica.

The need for something like HPE Synergy and the Gen10 stack -- where there are these very configurable stacks that you can put together -- has literally grown out of the work that we have done together, along with what we have done in our management stack, with the networking, compute, and storage.

Gardner: The combination of composable infrastructure and SDDC makes for a pretty strong tag team.

Baguley: Yes, definitely. It gives you that flexibility and the agility that a cloud provider needs to then meet the agility requirements of their customers, definitely.

Gardner: When it comes to bringing more end users into the clouds for your managed services providers, one of the important things is for end users to move into that cloud with as much ease as possible. Because VMware is a de facto standard in many markets with its vSphere Hypervisor, how does that help you, being a VMware stack, create that ease of joining these clouds?

Seamless migrations

Oriol Barat: Having the same technology in the customer data center and in our cloud makes things a lot easier. In the first place, in terms of confidence, the customer can be confident that it’s going to work well when it is in place. The other thing is that VMware is providing us with the tools that make these migrations easier.

Baguley: At VMworld 2017, we announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), which is our hybrid cloud connector. It allows customers to locally install software that connects at a Layer 2 [network] level, as well as right back to vSphere 5.0 in clouds. Those clouds now are IBM and VMware cloud native, but we are extending it to other service providers like Telefonica in 2018.

The important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud.

So a customer can truly feel that their connecting and migrations will be seamless. Things like vSphere vMotion across that gap are going to be possible, too. I think the important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud, because some of the fear is about getting locked in: “I am going to make decisions that I will regret in two years by converting my virtual machines (VMs) to run on another platform.” Right here, there isn’t that fear, there is just more choice, and Telefonica is very much part of that story of choice.

Gardner: It sounds like you have made things attractive for managed service providers in many markets. For example, they gain ease of migration from enterprises into the provider’s cloud. In the case of Telefonica, users gain support, services and integration, knowing that the venerable vendors like VMware and HPE are behind the underlying services.

Do you have any examples where you have been able to bring this total solution to a typical managed service provider account? How has it worked out for them?

Everyone’s doing it

Oriol Barat: We have use cases in all the vertical industries. Because cloud is a horizontal technology, it’s the foundation of everything. I would say that all companies of all verticals are in this process of transformation.

We have a lot of customers in retail that are moving their platforms to cloud. We have had, for example, US companies coming to Europe and deploying their SAP systems on top of our platforms.

For example in Spain, we have a very strong tourism industry with a lot of hotel chains that are also using our cloud services for their reservation systems and for more of their IT.

We have use cases in healthcare, of companies moving their medical systems to our clouds.

We have use cases of software vendors that are growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses and they need a flexible platform that can grow as their businesses grow.

A lot of people are using these platforms as disaster recovery (DR) for the platforms that they have on-premises.

And that brings us to the last part of our discussion. What happens next? When we have proven technology in place, and we have cloud adoption, where would you like to be in 12 months?

Gaining the edge

Baguley: There has been a lot of talk at recent events, like HPE Discover, about intelligent edge developments. We are doing a lot at the edge, too. When you look at telcos, the edge is going to become something quite interesting.

What we are talking about is taking that same blend of storage, networking and compute, and running it on as small a device as possible. So think micro data centers, nano data centers. How far out can we push this cloud? How much can we distribute this cloud? How close to the point of need can we get our customers to execute their workloads, to do their artificial intelligence (AI), to do their data gathering, et cetera?

And working in partnership with someone who has a fantastic cloud and a fantastic network just means that a customer who is looking to build some kind of distributed edge-to-cloud core capability is something that Telefonica and VMware could probably do over the next 12 months. That could be really, really strong.

Gardner: Antonio?

Oriol Barat: In this transformation that all the enterprises are in, maybe we are in the 20 percent of execution range. So we still have 80 percent of the transformation ahead of us. The potential is huge.

Looking ahead with our services, for example, it’s very important that the network is also in transformation, leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. These networks are going to be more flexible. We think that we are in a good position to put together cloud services with such network services -- with security, also with more software-defined capabilities, and create really flexible solutions for our customers.

Baguley: One example that I would like to add is if you can imagine that maybe Real Madrid C.F. are playing at home next weekend ... It’s theoretical that Telefonica could have the bottom of those network base stations -- because of VMware Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), it’s no longer specific base station hardware, it’s x86 HPE servers in there. They can maybe turn around to a betting company and say, “Would you like to move your front-end web servers with running containers to run in the base station, in Real Madrid’s stadium, for the four hours in the afternoon of that match?” And suddenly they are the best performing website.

That’s the kind of out-there transformative ideas that are now possible due to new application infrastructures, new cloud infrastructures, edge, and technologies like the network all coming together. So those are the kind of things you are going to see from this kind of solutions approach going forward.

The use of containers by developers -- and now increasingly IT operators -- has grown from infatuation to deep and abiding love. But as with any long-term affair, the honeymoon soon leads to needing to live well together ... and maybe even getting some relationship help along the way.

And so it goes with container orchestration and automation solutions, which are rapidly emerging as the means to maintain the bliss between rapid container adoption and broad container use among multiple cloud hosts.

This BriefingsDirect cloud services maturity discussion focuses on new ways to gain container orchestration, to better use serverless computing models, and employ inclusive management to keep the container love alive.

The next BriefingsDirect cloud efficiency case study explores how a storage-as-a-service offering in a university setting gains performance and lower total cost benefits by a move to all-flash storage.

Gardner: How is satisfying the storage demands at a large and diverse university setting a challenge? Is there something about your users and the diverse nature of their needs that provides you with a complex requirements list?

Dunington: A university setting isn't much different than any other business. The demands are the same. UBC has about 65,000 students and about 15,000 staff. The students these days are younger kids, they all have iPhones and iPads, and they just want to push buttons and get instant results and instant gratification. And that boils down to the services that we offer.

Dunington

We have to be able to offer those services, because as most people know, there are choices -- and they can go somewhere else and choose those other products.

Our team is a rather small team. There are 15 members in our team, so we have to be agile, we have to be able to automate things, and we need tools that can work and fulfill those needs. So it's just like any other business, even though it’s a university setting.

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Flash Performance

Gardner: Can you give us a sense of the scale that describes your storage requirements?

Dunington: We do SaaS, we also do infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). EduCloud is a self-service IaaS product that we deliver to UBC, but we also deliver it to 25 other higher institutions in the Province of British Columbia.

We have been doing IaaS for five years, and we have been very, very successful. So more people are looking to us for guidance.

Because we are not just delivering to UBC, we have to be up running and always able to deliver, because each school has different requirements. At different times of the year -- because there is registration, there are exam times -- these things have to be up. You can’t not be functioning during an exam and have 600 students not able to take the tests that they have been studying for. So it impacts their life and we want to make sure that we are there and can provide the services for what they need.

Gardner: In order to maintain your service levels within those peak times, do you in your IaaS and storage services employ hybrid-cloud capabilities so that you can burst? Or are you doing this all through your own data center and your own private cloud?

On-Campus Cloud

Dunington: We do it all on-campus. British Columbia has a law that says all the data has to stay in Canada. It’s a data-sovereignty law, the data can't leave the borders.

That's why EduCloud has been so successful, in my opinion, because of that option. They can just go and throw things out in the private cloud.

The public cloud providers are providing more services in Canada: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud are putting data centers in Canada, which is good and it gives people an option. Our team’s goal is to provide the services, whether it's a hybrid model or all on-campus. We just want to be able to fulfill those needs.

Gardner: It sounds like the best of all worlds. You are able to give that elasticity benefit, a lot of instant service requirements met for your consumers. But you are starting to use cloud pay-as-you-go types of models and get the benefit of the public cloud model -- but with the security, control and manageability of the private clouds.

What decisions have you made about your storage underpinnings, the infrastructure that supports your SaaS cloud?

Dunington: We have a large storage footprint. For our site, it’s about 12 petabytes of storage. We realized that we weren’t meeting the needs with spinning disks. One of the problems was that we had runaway virtual workloads that would cause problems, and they would impact other services. We needed some mechanism to fix that.

We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to attain quality of service levels and control those runaway virtual machines in our footprint.

We went through the whole request for proposal (RFP) process, and all the IT infrastructure vendors responded, but we did have some guidelines that we wanted to go through. One of the things we did is present our problems and make sure that they understood what the problems were and what they were trying to solve.

And there were some minimum requirements. We do have a backup vendor of choice that they needed to merge with. And quality of service is a big thing. We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to attain quality of service levels and control those runaway virtual machines in our footprint.

Gardner: You gained more than just flash benefits when you got to flash storage, right?

Streamlined, safe, flash storage

Dunington: Yes, for sure. With an entire data center full of spinning disks, it gets to the point where the disks start to manage you; you are no longer managing the disks. And the teams out there changing drives, removing volumes around it, it becomes unwieldy. I mean, the power, the footprint, and all that starts to grow.

Also, Vancouver is in a seismic zone, we are right up against the Pacific plate and it's a very active seismic area. Heaven forbid anything happens, but one of the requirements we had was to move the data center into the interior of the province. So that was what we did.

When we brought this new data center online, one of the decisions the team made was to move to an all-flash storage environment. We wanted to be sure that it made financial sense because it's publicly funded, and also improved the user experience, across the province.

Gardner: As you were going about your decision-making process, you had choices, what made you choose what you did? What were the deciding factors?

Dunington: There were a lot of deciding factors. There’s the technology, of being able to meet the performance and to manage the performance. One of the things was to lock down runaway virtual machines and to put performance tiers on others.

But it’s not just the technology; it's also the business part, too. The financial part had to make sense. When you are buying any storage platform, you are also buying the support team and the sales team that come with it.

Our team believes that technology is a certain piece of the pie, and the rest of it is relationship. If that relationship part doesn't work, it doesn’t matter how well the technology part works -- the whole thing is going to break down.

Because software is software, hardware is hardware -- it breaks, it has problems, there are limitations. And when you have to call someone, you have to depend on him or her. Even though you bought the best technology and got the best price -- if it doesn't work, it doesn’t work, and you need someone to call.

So those service and support issues were all wrapped up into the decision.

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Flash Performance

We chose the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) 3PAR all-flash storage platform. We have been very happy with it. We knew the HPE team well. They came and worked with us on the server blade infrastructure, so we knew the team. The team knew how to support all of it.

We also use the HPE OneView product for provisioning, and it integrated into that all. It also supported the performance optimization tool (IT Operations Management for HPE OneView) to let us set those values, because one of the things in EduCloud is customers choose their own storage tier, and we mark the price on it. So basically all we would do is present that new tier as new data storage within VMware and then they would just move their workloads across non-disruptively. So it has worked really well.

The 3PAR storage piece also integrates with VMware vRealize Operations Manager. We offer that to all our clients as a portal so they can see how everything is working and they can do their own diagnostics. Because that’s the one goal we have with EduCloud, it has to be self-service. We can let the customers do it, that's what they want.

Gardner: Not that long ago people had the idea that flash was always more expensive and that they would use it for just certain use-cases rather than pervasively. You have been talking in terms of a total cost of ownership reduction. So how does that work? How does the economics of this over a period of time, taking everything into consideration, benefit you all?

Economic sense at scale

Dunington: Our IT team and our management team are really good with that part. They were able to break it all down, and they found that this model would work at scale. I don’t know the numbers per se, but it made economic sense.

Spinning disks will still have a place in the data center. I don't know a year from now if an all-flash data center will make sense, because there are some records that people will throw in and never touch. But right now with the numbers on how we worked it out, it makes sense, because we are using the standard bronze, the gold, the silver tiers, and with the tiers it makes sense.

The 3PAR solution also has dedupe functionality and the compression that they just released. We are hoping to see how well that trends. Compression has only been around for a short period of time, so I can’t really say, but the dedupe has done really well for us.

Gardner: The technology overcomes some of the other baseline economic costs and issues, for sure.

We have talked about the technology and performance requirements. Have you been able to qualify how, from a user experience, this has been a benefit?

Dunington: The best benchmark is the adoption rate. People are using it, and there are no help desk tickets, so no one is complaining. People are using it, and we can see that everything is ramping up, and we are not getting tickets. No one is complaining about the price, the availability. Our operational team isn't complaining about it being harder to manage or that the backups aren’t working. That makes me happy.

The big picture

Gardner: Brent, maybe a word of advice to other organizations that are thinking about a similar move to private cloud SaaS. Now that you have done this, what might you advise them to do as they prepare for or evaluate a similar activity?

Not everybody needs that speed, not everybody needs that performance, but it is the future and things will move there.

Dunington: Look at the full picture, look at the total cost of ownership. There’s the buying of the hardware, and there's also supporting the hardware, too. Make sure that you understand your requirements and what your customers are looking for first before you go out and buy it. Not everybody needs that speed, not everybody needs that performance, but it is the future and things will move there. We will see in a couple of years how it went.

Look at the big picture, step back. It’s just not the new shiny toy, and you might have to take a stepped approach into buying, but for us it worked. I mean, it’s a solid platform, our team sleeps well at night, and I think our customers are really happy with it.

Gardner: This might be a little bit of a pun in the education field, but do your homework and you will benefit.

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst interview examines the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum.

Managing hybrid IT necessitates not only a choice between public cloud and private cloud, but a more granular approach to picking and choosing which assets go where based on performance, costs, compliance, and business agility.

Gardner: Now that cloud adoption is gaining steam, it may be time to step back and assess what works and what doesn’t. In past IT adoption patterns, we’ve seen a rapid embrace that sometimes ends with at least a temporary hangover. Sometimes, it’s complexity or runaway or unmanaged costs, or even usage patterns that can’t be controlled. Mark, is it too soon to begin assessing best practices in identifying ways to hedge against any ill effects from runaway adoption of cloud?

Peters: The short answer, Dana, is no. It’s not that the IT world is that different. It’s just that we have more and different tools. And that is really what hybrid comes down to -- available tools.

Peters

It’s not that those tools themselves demand a new way of doing things. They offer the opportunity to continue to think about what you want. But if I have one repeated statement as we go through this, it will be that it’s not about focusing on the tools, it’s about focusing on what you’re trying to get done. You just happen to have more and different tools now.

Gardner: We hear sometimes that at as high as board of director levels, they are telling people to go cloud-first, or just dump IT all together. That strikes me as an overreaction. If we’re looking at tools and to what they do best, is cloud so good that we can actually just go cloud-first or cloud-only?

Cloudy cloud adoption

Peters: Assuming you’re speaking about management by objectives (MBO), doing cloud or cloud-only because that’s what someone with a C-level title saw on a Microsoft cloud ad on TV and decided that is right, well -- that clouds everything.

You do see increasingly different people outside of IT becoming involved in the decision. When I say outside of IT, I mean outside of the operational side of IT.

You get other functions involved in making demands. And because the cloud can be so easy to consume, you see people just running off and deploying some software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model because it looked easy to do, and they didn’t want to wait for the internal IT to make the change.

All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see.

Running away from internal IT and on-premises IT is not going to be a good idea for most organizations -- at least for a considerable chunk of their workloads. All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see.

Gardner: I certainly agree with that. If it’s all then about a mix of things, how do I determine the correct mix? And if it’s a correct mix between just a public cloud and private cloud, how do I then properly adjust to considerations about applications as opposed to data, as opposed to bringing in microservices and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when they’re the best fit?

How do we begin to rationalize all of this better? Because I think we’ve gotten to the point where we need to gain some maturity in terms of the consumption of hybrid IT.

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Peters: I often talk about what I call the assumption gap. And the assumption gap is just that moment where we move from one side where it’s okay to have lots of questions about something, in this case, in IT. And then on the other side of this gap or chasm, to use a well-worn phrase, is where it’s not okay to ask anything because you’ll see you don’t know what you’re talking about. And that assumption gap seems to happen imperceptibly and very fast at some moment.

So, what is hybrid IT? I think we fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to believe that having some on-premises workloads and applications and some off-premises workloads and applications is hybrid IT. I do not think it is. It’s using a couple of tools for different things.

It’s like having a Prius and a big diesel and/or gas F-150 pickup truck in your garage and saying, “I have two hybrid vehicles.” No, you have one of each, or some of each. Just because someone has put an application or a backup off into the cloud, “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m hybrid.” No, you’re not really.

The cloud approach

The cloud is an approach. It’s not a thing per se. It’s another way. As I said earlier, it’s another tool that you have in the IT arsenal. So how do you start figuring what goes where?

I don’t think there are simple answers, because it would be just as sensible a question to say, “Well, what should go on flash or what should go on disk, or what should go on tape, or what should go on paper?” My point being, such decisions are situational to individual companies, to the stage of that company’s life, and to the budgets they have. And they’re not only situational -- they’re also dynamic.

I want to give a couple of examples because I think they will stick with people. Number one is you take something like email, a pretty popular application; everyone runs email. In some organizations, that is the crucial application. They cannot run without it. Probably, what you and I do would fall into that category. But there are other businesses where it’s far less important than the factory running or the delivery vans getting out on time. So, they could have different applications that are way more important than email.

When instant messaging (IM) first came out, Yahoo IM text came out, to be precise. They used to do the maintenance between 9 am and 5 pm because it was just a tool to chat to your friends with at night. And now you have businesses that rely on that. So, clearly, the ability to instant message and text between us is now crucial. The stock exchange in Chicago runs on it. IM is a very important tool.

The answer is not that you or I have the ability to tell any given company, “Well, x application should go onsite and Y application should go offsite or into a cloud,” because it will vary between businesses and vary across time.

If something is or becomes mission-critical or high-risk, it is more likely that you’ll want the feeling of security, I’m picking my words very carefully, of having it … onsite.

You have to figure out what you're trying to get done before you figure out what you're going to do with it.

But the extent to which full-production apps are being moved to the cloud is growing every day. That’s what our research shows us. The quick answer is you have to figure out what you’re trying to get done before you figure out what you’re going to do it with.

Gardner: Before we go into learning more about how organizations can better know themselves and therefore understand the right mix, let’s learn more about you, Mark.

Tell us about yourself, your organization at ESG. How long have you been an IT industry analyst?

Peters: I grew up in my working life in the UK and then in Europe, working on the vendor side of IT. I grew up in storage, and I haven’t really escaped it. These days I run ESG’s infrastructure practice. The integration and the interoperability between the various elements of infrastructure have become more important than the individual components. I stayed on the vendor side for many years working in the UK, then in Europe, and now in Colorado. I joined ESG 10 years ago.

Lessons learned from storage

Gardner: It’s interesting that you mentioned storage, and the example of whether it should be flash or spinning media, or tape. It seems to me that maybe we can learn from what we’ve seen happen in a hybrid environment within storage and extrapolate to how that pertains to a larger IT hybrid undertaking.

Is there something about the way we’ve had to adjust to different types of storage -- and do that intelligently with the goals of performance, cost, and the business objectives in mind? I’ll give you a chance to perhaps go along with my analogy or shoot it down. Can we learn from what’s happened in storage and apply that to a larger hybrid IT model?

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Peters: The quick answer to your question is, absolutely, we can. Again, the cloud is a different approach. It is a very beguiling and useful business model, but it’s not a panacea. I really don’t believe it ever will become a panacea.

Now, that doesn’t mean to say it won’t grow. It is growing. It’s huge. It’s significant. You look at the recent announcements from the big cloud providers. They are at tens of billions of dollars in run rates.

But to your point, it should be viewed as part of a hierarchy, or a tiering, of IT. I don’t want to suggest that cloud sits at the bottom of some hierarchy or tiering. That’s not my intent. But it is another choice of another tool.

Let’s be very, very clear about this. There isn’t “a” cloud out there. People talk about the cloud as if it exists as one thing. It does not. Part of the reason hybrid IT is so challenging is you’re not just choosing between on-prem and the cloud, you’re choosing between on-prem and many clouds -- and you might want to have a multi-cloud approach as well. We see that increasingly.

What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes.

Those various clouds have various attributes; some are better than others in different things. It is exactly parallel to what you were talking about in terms of which server you use, what storage you use, what speed you use for your networking. It’s exactly parallel to the decisions you should make about which cloud and to what extent you deploy to which cloud. In other words, all the things you said at the beginning: cost, risk, requirements, and performance.

People get so distracted by bright, shiny objects. Like they are the answer to everything. What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes. That’s all we should be looking for.

Focus on the outcome that you want, and then you figure out how to get it. You should not be sitting down IT managers and saying, “How do I get to 50 percent of my data in the cloud?” I don’t think that’s a sensible approach to business.

Gardner: Lessons learned in how to best utilize a hybrid storage environment, rationalizing that, bringing in more intelligence, software-defined, making the network through hyper-convergence more of a consideration than an afterthought -- all these illustrate where we’re going on a larger scale, or at a higher abstraction.

Going back to the idea that each organization is particular -- their specific business goals, their specific legacy and history of IT use, their specific way of using applications and pursuing business processes and fulfilling their obligations. How do you know in your organization enough to then begin rationalizing the choices? How do you make business choices and IT choices in conjunction? Have we lost sufficient visibility, given that there are so many different tools for doing IT?

Get down to specifics

Peters: The answer is yes. If you can’t see it, you don’t know about it. So to some degree, we are assuming that we don’t know everything that’s going on. But I think anecdotally what you propose is absolutely true.

I’ve beaten home the point about starting with the outcomes, not the tools that you use to achieve those outcomes. But how do you know what you’ve even got -- because it’s become so easy to consume in different ways? A lot of people talk about shadow IT. You have this sprawl of a different way of doing things. And so, this leads to two requirements.

Number one is gaining visibility. It’s a challenge with shadow IT because you have to know what’s in the shadows. You can’t, by definition, see into that, so that’s a tough thing to do. Even once you find out what’s going on, the second step is how do you gain control? Control -- not for control’s sake -- only by knowing all the things you were trying to do and how you’re trying to do them across an organization. And only then can you hope to optimize them.

You can't manage what you can't measure. You also can't improve things that can't be managed or measured.

Again, it’s an old, old adage. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. You also can’t improve things that can’t be managed or measured. And so, number one, you have to find out what’s in the shadows, what it is you’re trying to do. And this is assuming that you know what you are aiming toward.

This is the next battleground for sophisticated IT use and for vendors. It’s not a battleground for the users. It’s a choice for users -- but a battleground for vendors. They must find a way to help their customers manage everything, to control everything, and then to optimize everything. Because just doing the first and finding out what you have -- and finding out that you’re in a mess -- doesn’t help you.

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Visibility is not the same as solving. The point is not just finding out what you have – but of actually being able to do something about it. The level of complexity, the range of applications that most people are running these days, the extremely high levels of expectations both in the speed and flexibility and performance, and so on, mean that you cannot, even with visibility, fix things by hand.

You and I grew up in the era where a lot of things were done on whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets. That doesn’t cut it anymore. We have to find a way to manage what is automated. Manual management just will not cut it -- even if you know everything that you’re doing wrong.

Gardner: Yes, I agree 100 percent that the automation -- in order to deal with the scale of complexity, the requirements for speed, the fact that you’re going to be dealing with workloads and IT assets that are off of your premises -- means you’re going to be doing this programmatically. Therefore, you’re in a better position to use automation.

I’d like to go back again to storage. When I first took a briefing with Nimble Storage, which is now a part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), I was really impressed with the degree to which they used intelligence to solve the economic and performance problems of hybrid storage.

Given the fact that we can apply more intelligence nowadays -- that the cost of gathering and harnessing data, the speed at which it can be analyzed, the degree to which that analysis can be shared -- it’s all very fortuitous that just as we need greater visibility and that we have bigger problems to solve across hybrid IT, we also have some very powerful analysis tools.

Intelligent automation a must

Peters: I think it is a very straightforward and good parallel. Storage has become increasingly sophisticated. I’ve been in and around the storage business now for more than three decades. The joke has always been, I remember when a megabyte was a lot, let alone a gigabyte, a terabyte, and an exabyte.

And I’d go for a whole day class, when I was on the sales side of the business, just to learn something like dual parsing or about cache. It was so exciting 30 years ago. And yet, these days, it’s a bit like cars. I mean, you and I used to use a choke, or we’d have to really go and check everything on the car before we went on 100-mile journey. Now, we press the button and it better work in any temperature and at any speed. Now, we just demand so much from cars.

To stretch that analogy, I’m mixing cars and storage -- and we’ll make it all come together with hybrid IT in that it’s better to do things in an automated fashion. There’s always one person in every crowd I talk to who still believes that a stick shift is more economic and faster than an automatic transmission. It might be true for one in 1,000 people, and they probably drive cars for a living. But for most people, 99 percent of the people, 99.9 percent of the time, an automatic transmission will both get you there faster and be more efficient in doing so. The same became true of storage.

We used to talk about how much storage someone could capacity-plan or manage. That’s just become old hat now because you don’t talk about it in those terms. Storage has moved to be -- how do we serve applications? How do we serve up the right place in the right time, get the data to the right person at the right time at the right price, and so on?

We don’t just choose what goes where or who gets what, we set the parameters -- and we then allow the machine to operate in an automated fashion. These days, increasingly, if you talk to 10 storage companies, 10 of them will talk to you about machine learning and AI because they know they’ve got to be in that in order to make that execution of change ever more efficient and ever faster. They’re just dealing with tremendous scale, and you could not do it even with simple automation that still involves humans.

It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. It will not be a “recommending tool,” it will be an “executing tool.”

We have used cars as a social analogy. We used storage as an IT analogy, and absolutely, that’s where hybrid IT is going. It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. Just to make it crystal clear, it will not be a “recommending tool,” it will be an “executing tool.” There is no time to wait for you and me to finish our coffee, think about it, and realize we have to do something, because then it’s too late. So, it’s not just about the knowledge and the visibility. It’s about the execution and the automated change. But, yes, I think your analogy is a very good one for how the IT world will change.

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Gardner: How you execute, optimize and exploit intelligence capabilities can be how you better compete, even if other things are equal. If everyone is using AWS, and everyone is using the same services for storage, servers, and development, then how do you differentiate?

How you optimize the way in which you gain the visibility, know your own business, and apply the lessons of optimization, will become a deciding factor in your success, no matter what business you’re in. The tools that you pick for such visibility, execution, optimization and intelligence will be the new real differentiators among major businesses.

So, Mark, where do we look to find those tools? Are they yet in development? Do we know the ones we should expect? How will organizations know where to look for the next differentiating tier of technology when it comes to optimizing hybrid IT?

What’s in the mix?

Peters: We’re talking years ahead for us to be in the nirvana that you’re discussing.

I just want to push back slightly on what you said. This would only apply if everyone were using exactly the same tools and services from AWS, to use your example. The expectation, assuming we have a hybrid world, is they will have kept some applications on-premises, or they might be using some specialist, regional or vertical industry cloud. So, I think that’s another way for differentiation. It’s how to get the balance. So, that’s one important thing.

And then, back to what you were talking about, where are those tools? How do you make the right move?

We have to get from here to there. It’s all very well talking about the future. It doesn’t sound great and perfect, but you have to get there. We do quite a lot of research in ESG. I will throw just a couple of numbers, which I think help to explain how you might do this.

We already find that the multi-cloud deployment or option is a significant element within a hybrid IT world. So, asking people about this in the last few months, we found that about 75 percent of the respondents already have more than one cloud provider, and about 40 percent have three or more.

You’re getting diversity -- whether by default or design. It really doesn’t matter at this point. We hope it’s by design. But nonetheless, you’re certainly getting people using different cloud providers to take advantage of the specific capabilities of each.

This is a real mix. You can’t just plunk down some new magic piece of software, and everything is okay, because it might not work with what you already have -- the legacy systems, and the applications you already have. One of the other questions we need to ask is how does improved management embrace legacy systems?

Some 75 percent of our respondents want hybrid management to be from the infrastructure up, which means that it’s got to be based on managing their existing infrastructure, and then extending that management up or out into the cloud. That’s opposed to starting with some cloud management approach and then extending it back down to their infrastructure.

People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It’s enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change.

People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It's enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change. Rather than just deploying something and hoping that all of your current infrastructure -- not just your physical infrastructure but your applications, too -- can use that, we see a lot of people going to a multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model. That entirely makes sense. You're not just going to pick one cloud model and hope that it will come backward and make everything else work. You start with what you have and you gradually embrace these alternative tools.

Gardner: We’re creating quite a list of requirements for what we’d like to see develop in terms of this management, optimization, and automation capability that’s maybe two or three years out. Vendors like Microsoft are just now coming out with the ability to manage between their own hybrid infrastructures, their own cloud offerings like Azure Stack and their public cloud Azure.

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Where will we look for that breed of fully inclusive, fully intelligent tools that will allow us to get to where we want to be in a couple of years? I’ve heard of one from HPE, it’s called Project New Hybrid IT Stack. I’m thinking that HPE can’t be the only company. We can’t be the only analysts that are seeing what to me is a market opportunity that you could drive a truck through. This should be a big problem to solve.

Who’s driving?

Peters: There are many organizations, frankly, for which this would not be a good commercial decision, because they don’t play in multiple IT areas or they are not systems providers. That’s why HPE is interested, capable, and focused on doing this.

Many vendor organizations are either focused on the cloud side of the business -- and there are some very big names -- or on the on-premises side of the business. Embracing both is something that is not as difficult for them to do, but really not top of their want-to-do list before they’re absolutely forced to.

From that perspective, the ones that we see doing this fall into two categories. There are the trendy new startups, and there are some of those around. The problem is, it’s really tough imagining that particularly large enterprises are going to risk [standardizing on them]. They probably even will start to try and write it themselves, which is possible – unlikely, but possible.

Where I think we will get the list for the other side is some of the other big organizations --- Oracle and IBM spring to mind in terms of being able to embrace both on-premises and off-premises. But, at the end of the day, the commonality among those that we’ve mentioned is that they are systems companies. At the end of the day, they win by delivering the best overall solution and package to their clients, not individual components within it.

If you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment took, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor.

And by individual components, I include cloud, on-premises, and applications. If you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment tool, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor. That last part I think is self-descriptive.

Gardner: Clearly, not a big group. We’re not going to be seeking suppliers for hybrid IT management from request for proposals (RFPs) from 50 or 60 different companies to find some solutions.

Peters: Well, you won’t need to. Looking not that many years ahead, there will not be that many choices when it comes to full IT provisioning.

Gardner: Mark, any thoughts about what IT organizations should be thinking about in terms of how to become proactive rather than reactive to the hybrid IT environment and the complexity, and to me the obvious need for better management going forward?

Management ends, not means

Peters: Gaining visibility into not just hybrid IT but the on-premise and the off-premise and how you manage these things. Those are all parts of the solution, or the answer. The real thing, and it’s absolutely crucial, is that you don’t start with those bright shiny objects. You don’t start with, “How can I deploy more cloud? How can I do hybrid IT?” Those are not good questions to ask. Good questions to ask are, “What do I need to do as an organization? How do I make my business more successful? How does anything in IT become a part of answering those questions?”

In other words, drum roll, it’s the thinking about ends, not means.

Gardner: If our listeners and readers want to follow you and gain more of your excellent insight, how should they do that?

Peters: The best way is to go to our website, www.esg-global.com. You can find not just me and all my contact details and materials but those of all my colleagues and the many areas we cover and study in this wonderful world of IT.

The next BriefingsDirect IT financing and technology acquisition strategies interview examines how Nokia is refactoring the video delivery business. Learn both about new video delivery architectures and the creative ways media companies are paying for the technology that supports them.

Gardner: It seems that the video-delivery business is in upheaval. How are video delivery trends coming together to make it necessary for rethinking architectures? How are pricing models and business models changing, too?

Larbey: We sit here in 2017, but let’s look back 10 years to 2007. There were a couple key events in 2007 that dramatically shaped how we all consume video today and how, as a company, we use technology to go to market.

Larbey

It’s been 10 years since the creation of the Apple iPhone. The iPhone sparked whole new device-types, moving eventually into the iPad. Not only that, Apple underneath developed a lot of technology in terms of how you stream video, how you protect video over IP, and the technology underneath that, which we still use today. Not only did they create a new device-type and avenue for us to watch video, they also created new underlying protocols.

It was also 10 years ago that Netflix began to first offer a video streaming service. So if you look back, I see one year in which how we all consume our video today was dramatically changed by a couple of events.

If we fast-forward, and look to where that goes to in the future, there are two trends we see today that will create challenges tomorrow. Video has become truly mobile. When we talk about mobile video, we mean watching some films on our iPad or on our iPhone -- so not on a big TV screen, that is what most people mean by mobile video today.

The future is personalized

When you can take your video with you, you want to take all your content with you. You can’t do that today. That has to happen in the future. When you are on an airplane, you can’t take your content with you. You need connectivity to extend so that you can take your content with you no matter where you are.

Take the simple example of a driverless car. Now, you are driving along and you are watching the satellite-navigation feed, watching the traffic, and keeping the kids quiet in the back. When driverless cars come, what you are going to be doing? You are still going to be keeping the kids quiet, but there is a void, a space that needs to be filled with activity, and clearly extending the content into the car is the natural next step.

And the final challenge is around personalization. TV will become a lot more personalized. Today we all get the same user experience. If we are all on the same service provider, it looks the same -- it’s the same color, it’s the same grid. There is no reason why that should all be the same. There is no reason why my kids shouldn’t have a different user interface.

There is no reason why I should have 10 pages of channels that I have to through to find something that I want to watch.

The user interface presented to me in the morning may be different than the user interface presented to me in the evening. There is no reason why I should have 10 pages of channels that I have to go through to find something that I want to watch. Why aren’t all those channels specifically curated for me? That’s what we mean by personalization. So if you put those all together and extrapolate those 10 years into the future, then 2027 will be a very different place for video.

Gardner: It sounds like a few things need to change between the original content’s location and those mobile screens and those customized user scenarios you just described. What underlying architecture needs to change in order to get us to 2027 safely?

Larbey: It’s a journey; this is not a step-change. This is something that’s going to happen gradually.

But if you step back and look at the fundamental changes -- all video will be streamed. Today, the majority of what we view is via broadcasting, from cable TV, or from a satellite. It’s a signal that’s going to everybody at the same time.

If you think about the mobile video concept, if you think about personalization, that is not going be the case. Today we watch a portion of our video streamed over IP. In the future, it will all be streamed over IP.

And that clearly creates challenges for operators in terms of how to architect the network, how to optimize the delivery, and how to recreate that broadcast experience using streaming video. This is where a lot of our innovation is focused today.

Gardner: You also mentioned in the case of an airplane, where it's not just streaming but also bringing a video object down to the device. What will be different in terms of the boundary between the stream and a download?

IT’s all about intelligence

Larbey: It’s all about intelligence. Firstly, connectivity has to extend and become really ubiquitous via technology such as 5G. The increase in fiber technology will dramatically enable truly ubiquitous connectivity, which we don’t really have today. That will resolve some of the problems, but not all.

But, by the fact that television will be personalized, the network will know what’s in my schedule. If I have an upcoming flight, machine learning can automatically predict what I’m going to do and make sure it suggests the right content in context. It may download the content because it knows I am going to be sitting in a flight for the next 12 hours.

Gardner: We are putting intelligence into the network to be beneficial to the user experience. But it sounds like it’s also going to give you the opportunity to be more efficient, with just-in-time utilization -- minimal viable streaming, if you will.

How does the network becoming more intelligent also benefit the carriers, the deliverers of the content, and even the content creators and owners? There must be an increased benefit for them on utility as well as in the user experience?

Larbey: Absolutely. We think everything moves into the network, and the intelligence becomes the network. So what does that do immediately? That means the operators don’t have to buy set-top boxes. They are expensive. They are very costly to maintain. They stay in the network a long time. They can have a much lighter client capability, which basically just renders the user interface.

The first obvious example of all this, that we are heavily focused on, is the storage. So taking the hard drive out of the set-top box and putting that data back into the network. Some huge deployments are going on at the moment in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) using the HPE Apollo platform to deploy high-density storage systems that remove the need to ship a set-top box with a hard drive in it.

HPE Rethinks

And Use IT

Now, what are the advantages of that? Everybody thinks it’s costly, so you’ve taken the hard drive out, you have the storage in the network, and that’s clearly one element. But actually if you talk to any operator, their biggest cause of subscriber churn is when somebody’s set-top box fails and they lose their personalized recordings.

The personal connection you had with your service isn’t there any longer. It’s a lot easier to then look at competing services. So if that content is in the network, then clearly you don’t have that churn issue. Not only can you access your content from any mobile device, it’s protected and it will always be with you.

Taking the CDN private

Gardner: For the past few decades, part of the solution to this problem was to employ a content delivery network (CDN) and use that in a variety of ways. It started with web pages and the downloading of flat graphic files. Now that's extended into all sorts of objects and content. Are we going to do away with the CDN? Are we going to refactor it, is it going to evolve? How does that pan out over the next decade?

Larbey: The CDN will still exist. That still becomes the key way of optimizing video delivery -- but it changes. If you go back 10 years, the only CDNs available were CDNs in the Internet. So it was a shared service, you bought capacity on the shared service.

Even today that's how a lot of video from the content owners and broadcasters is streamed. For the past seven years, we have been taking that technology and deploying it in private network -- with both telcos and cable operators -- so they can have their own private CDN, and there are a lot of advantages to having your own private CDN.You get complete control of the roadmap. You can start to introduce advanced features such as targeted ad insertion, blackout, and features like that to generate more revenue. You have complete control over the quality of experience, which you don't if you outsource to a shared service.

There are a lot of advantages to having your own private CDN. You have complete control over the quality of experience which you don't if you outsource to a shared service.

What we’re seeing now is both the programmers and broadcasters taking an interest in that private CDN because they want the control. Video is their business, so the quality they deliver is even more important to them. We’re seeing a lot of the programmers and broadcasters starting to look at adopting the private CDN model as well.

The challenge is how do you build that? You have to build for peak. Peak is generally driven by live sporting events and one-off news events. So that leaves you with a lot of capacity that’s sitting idle a lot of the time. With cloud and orchestration, we have solved that technically -- we can add servers in very quickly, we can take them out very quickly, react to the traffic demands and we can technically move things around.

But the commercial model has lagged behind. So we have been working with HPE Financial Services to understand how we can innovate on that commercial model as well and get that flexibility -- not just from an IT perspective, but also from a commercial perspective.

Gardner: Tell me about Private CDN technology. Is that a Nokia product? Tell us about your business unit and the commercial models.

Larbey: We basically help as a business unit. Anyone who has content -- be that broadcasters or programmers – they pay the operators to stream the content over IP, and to launch new services. We have a product focused on video networking: How to optimize a video, how it’s delivered, how it’s streamed, and how it’s personalized.

It can be a private CDN product, which we have deployed for the last seven years, and we have a cloud digital video recorder (DVR) product, which is all about moving the storage capacity into the network. We also have a systems integration part, which brings a lot of technology together and allows operators to combine vendors and partners from the ecosystem into a complete end-to-end solution.

HPE Rethinks

And Use IT

Gardner: With HPE being a major supplier for a lot of the hardware and infrastructure, how does the new cost model change from the old model of pay up-front?

Flexible financial formats

Larbey: I would not classify HPE as a supplier; I think they are our partner. We work very closely together. We use HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 Servers, the HPE Apollo platform, and the HPE Moonshot platform, which are, as you know, world-leading compute-storage platforms that deliver these services cost-effectively. We have had a long-term technical relationship.

We are now moving toward how we advance the commercial relationship. We are working with the HPE Financial Services team to look at how we can get additional flexibility. There are a lot of pay-as-you-go-type financial IT models that have been in existence for some time -- but these don’t necessarily work for my applications from a financial perspective.

Our goal is to use 100 percent of the storage all of the time to maximize the cache hit-rate.

In the private CDN and the video applications, our goal is to use 100 percent of the storage all of the time to maximize the cache hit-rate. With the traditional IT payment model for storage, my application fundamentally breaks that. So having a partner like HPE that was flexible and could understand the application is really important.

We also needed flexibility of compute scaling. We needed to be able to deploy for the peak, but not pay for that peak at all times. That’s easy from the software technology side, but we needed it from the commercial side as well.

And thirdly, we have been trying to enter a new market and be focused on the programmers and broadcasters, which is not our traditional segment. We have been deploying our CDN to the largest telcos and cable operators in the world, but now, selling to that programmers and broadcasters segment -- they are used to buying a service from the Internet and they work in a different way and they have different requirements.

So we needed a financial model that allowed us to address that, but also a partner who would take some of the risk, too, because we didn’t know if it was going to be successful. Thankfully it has, and we have grown incredibly well, but it was a risk at the start. Finding a partner like HPE Financial Services who could share some of that risk was really important.

Gardner: These video delivery organizations are increasingly operating on subscription basis, so they would like to have their costs be incurred on a similar basis, so it all makes sense across the services ecosystem.

Our tolerance just doesn't exist anymore for buffering and we demand and expect the highest-quality video.

Larbey: Yes, absolutely. That is becoming more and more important. If you go back to the very first the Internet video, you watched of a cat falling off a chair on YouTube. It didn’t matter if it was buffering, that wasn't relevant. Now, our tolerance just doesn’t exist anymore for buffering and we demand and expect the highest-quality video.

If TV in 2027 is going to be purely IP, then clearly that has to deliver exactly the same quality of experience as the broadcasting technologies. And that creates challenges. The biggest obvious example is if you go to any IP TV operator and look at their streamed video channel that is live versus the one on broadcast, there is a big delay.

So there is a lag between the live event and what you are seeing on your IP stream, which is 30 to 40 seconds. If you are in an apartment block, watching a live sporting event, and your neighbor sees it 30 to 40 seconds before you, that creates a big issue. A lot of the innovations we’re now doing with streaming technologies are to deliver that same broadcast experience.

HPE Rethinks

And Use IT

Gardner: We now also have to think about 4K resolution, the intelligent edge, no latency, and all with managed costs. Fortunately at this time HPE is also working on a lot of edge technologies, like Edgeline and Universal IoT, and so forth. There’s a lot more technology being driven to the edge for storage, for large memory processing, and so forth. How are these advances affecting your organization?

Optimal edge: functionality and storage

Larbey: There are two elements. The compute, the edge, is absolutely critical. We are going to move all the intelligence into the network, and clearly you need to reduce the latency, and you need to able to scale that functionality. This functionality was scaled in millions of households, and now it has to be done in the network. The only way you can effectively build the network to handle that scale is to put as much functionality as you can at the edge of the network.

The HPE platforms will allow you to deploy that computer storage deep into the network, and they are absolutely critical for our success. We will run our CDN, our ad insertion, and all that capability as deeply into the network as an operator wants to go -- and certainly the deeper, the better.

The other thing we try to optimize all of the time is storage. One of the challenges with network-based recording -- especially in the US due to the content-use regulations compliance -- is that you have to store a copy per user. If, for example, both of us record the same program, there are two versions of that program in the cloud. That’s clearly very inefficient.

The question is how do you optimize that, and also support just-in-time transcoding techniques that have been talked about for some time. That would create the right quality of bitrate on the fly, so you don’t have to store all the different formats. It would dramatically reduce storage costs.

The challenge has always been that the computing processing units (CPUs) needed to do that, and that’s where HPE and the Moonshot platform, which has great compute density, come in. We have the Intel media library for doing the transcoding. It’s a really nice storage platform. But we still wanted to get even more out of it, so at our Bell Labs research facility we developed a capability called skim storage, which for a slight increase in storage, allows us to double the number of transcodes we can do on a single CPU.

That approach takes a really, really efficient hardware platform with nice technology and doubles the density we can get from it -- and that’s a big change for the business case.

Gardner: It’s astonishing to think that that much encoding would need to happen on the fly for a mass market; that’s a tremendous amount of compute, and an intense compute requirement.

Content popularity

Larbey: Absolutely, and you have to be intelligent about it. At the end of the day, human behavior works in our favor. If you look at most programs that people record, if they do not watch within the first seven days, they are probably not going to watch that recording. That content in particular then can be optimized from a storage perspective. You still need the ability to recreate it on the fly, but it improves the scale model.

Gardner: So the more intelligent you can be about what the users’ behavior and/or their use patterns, the more efficient you can be. Intelligence seems to be the real key here.

Larbey: Yes, we have a number of algorithms even within the CDN itself today that predict content popularity. We want to maximize the disk usage. We want the popular content on the disk, so what’s the point of us deleting a piece of a popular content just because a piece of long-tail content has been requested. We do a lot of algorithms looking at and trying to predict the content popularity so that we can make sure we are optimizing the hardware platform accordingly.

Gardner: Perhaps we can deepen our knowledge about this all through some examples. Do have some examples that demonstrate how your clients and customers are taking these new technologies and making better business decisions that help them in their cost structure -- but also deliver a far better user experience?

In-house control

Larbey: One of our largest customers is Liberty Global, with a large number of cable operators in a variety of countries across Europe. They were enhancing an IP service. They started with an Internet-based CDN and that’s how they were delivering their service. But recognizing the importance of gaining more control over costs and the quality experience, they wanted to take that in-house and put the content on a private CDN.

We worked with them to deliver that technology. One of things that they noticed very quickly, which I don’t think they were expecting, was a dramatic reduction in the number of people calling in to complain because the stream had stopped or buffered. They enjoyed a big decrease in call-center calls as soon as they switched on our new CDN technology, which is quite an interesting use-case benefit.

When they deployed a private CDN, they reached costs payback in less than 12 months.

We do a lot with Sky in the UK, which was also looking to migrate away from an Internet-based CDN service into something in-house so they could take more control over it and improve the users’ quality of experience.

One of our customers in Canada, TELUS, when they deployed a private CDN, they reached costs payback in less than 12 months in terms of both the network savings and the Internet CDN costs savings.

Gardner: Before we close out, perhaps a look to the future and thinking about some of the requirements on business models as we leverage edge intelligence. What about personalization services, or even inserting ads in different ways? Can there be more of a two-way relationship, or a one-to-one interaction with the end consumers? What are the increased benefits from that high-performing, high-efficiency edge architecture?

VR vision and beyond

Larbey: All of that generates more traffic -- moving from standard-definition to high-definition to 4K, to beyond 4K -- it all generates more network traffic. You then take into account a 360-degree-video capability and virtual reality (VR) services, which is a focus for Nokia with our Ozo camera, and it’s clear that the data is just going to explode.

So being able to optimize, and continue to optimize that, in terms of new codec technology and new streaming technologies -- to be able to constrain the growth of video demands on the network – is essential, otherwise the traffic would just explode.

There is lot of innovation going on to optimize the content experience. People may not want to watch all their TV through VR headsets. That may not become the way you want to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones. However, maybe there will be a uniquely created piece of content that’s an add-on in 360, and the real serious fans can go and look for it. I think we will see new types of content being created to address these different use-cases.

Gardner: What prompted you to improve on the way that object storage is being offered as a service? How might this become a new business opportunity for you?

Weise: About a year ago, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)Discover, I was wandering the event floor. We had just gotten out of a meeting with SwitchNAP, which is a major data center in Las Vegas. We had been talking to them about some preferred concepts and deployments for storage for their clients.

Weise

That discussion evolved into realizing that there are number of clients inside of Switch and their ecosystem that could make use of storage that was more locally based, that needed to be closer at hand. There were cost savings that could be gained if you have a connection within the same data center, or within the same fiber network.

Pulling data in and out of a cloud

Under this model, there would be significantly less expensive ways of pulling data in and out of a cloud, since you wouldn’t have transfer fees as you normally would. There would also be an advantage to privacy, and to cutting latency, and other beneficial things because of a private network all run by Switch and through their fiber network. So we looked at this and thought this might be interesting.

In discussions with the number of groups within HPE while wandering the floor at Discover, we found that there were some pretty interesting ways that we could play games with the network to allow clients to not have to uproot the way they do things, or force them to do things, for lack of a better term, “Our way.”

If you go to Amazon Web Services or you go to Microsoft Azure, you do it the Microsoft way, or you do it the Amazon way. You don’t really have a choice, since you have to follow their guidelines.

Where we saw value is, there are times in the mid-market space for clients -- ranging from a couple of hundred million dollars up to maybe a couple of billion dollars in annual revenue -- where they generally use object storage as kind of an inexpensive way to store archival, or less-frequently accessed, data. So [the cloud storage] became an alternative to tape and long-term storage.

We've had this massive explosion of unstructured data, files, and all sorts of things. We have a number of clients in medical and finance, and they have just seen this huge spike in data.

The challenge is: To deploy your own object storage is a fairly complex operation, and it requires a minimum number of petabytes to get started. In that mid-market, they are not typically measuring their storage in that petabytes level.

These customers are more typically in the tens to hundreds of terabytes range, and so they need an inexpensive way to offload that data and put it somewhere where it makes sense. In the medical industry particularly, there's a lot of concern about putting any kind of patient data up in a public cloud environment -- even with encryption.

We thought that if we are in the same data center, and it is a completely private operation that exists within these facilities, that will fulfill the total need -- and we can encrypt the data.

But we needed a way to support such private-cloud object storage that would be multitenant. Also, we just have had better luck working with open standards. The challenge with dealing with proprietary systems is you end up locked into a standard, and if you pick wrong, you find yourself having to reinvent everything later on.

I come from a networking background; I was an Internet plumber for many years. We saw the transition then on our side when routing protocols first got introduced. There were proprietary routing protocols, and there were open standards, and that’s what we still use today.

Transition to

HPE Data Center Networking

So we took a similar approach in object storage as a private-cloud service. We went down the open source path in terms of how we handled the provisioning. We needed something that integrated well with that. We needed a system that had the multitenancy, that understood the tenancy, and that is provided by OpenStack. We found a solution from HPE called Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) that allows us to carve up the network in all sorts of interesting ways, and that way we don't have to dictate to the client how to run it.

Many clients are still running traditional networks. The adoption of Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and other types of SDDC within the network is still pretty low, especially in the mid-market space. So to go to a client and dictate that they have to change how they run the network it is not going to work.

And we wanted it to be as simple as possible. We wanted to treat this as much as we could as a flat network. By using a combination of DCN, Altoline switches from HPE, and some of other software, we were able to give clients a complete network carrying regular Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) across it. We then could tie this together in a hybrid fashion, whereby the customers can actually treat our cloud environment as a natural extension of their existing networks, of their existing data centers.

Gardner: You are calling this hybrid storage as a service. It’s focused on object storage at this point, and you can take this into different data center environments. What are some of the sweet spots in the market?

Weise: The areas where we are seeing the most interest have been backup and archive. It’s an alternative to tape. The object service becomes a very inexpensive way to store large amounts of data, and unlike tape -- where it's inconvenient to access the data -- with object as a service everything is accessible very, very easily.

For customers that cannot directly integrate into that object service as supported by their backup software, we can make use of object gateways to provide a method that's more like traditional access. It looks like a file, or file share, and you edit the file share to be written to the object storage, and so it acts as a go-between. For backup and archive, it makes a really, really great solution.

The other two areas where we seen the most interest have been in the medical space, specifically for large medical image files and archival. We’re working now specifically to build that type of solution, with HIPAA compliance. We have gone through the audits and compliance verification.

The second use-case has been in the media and entertainment industry. In fact, they are the very first to consume this new system and put in hundreds of terabytes worth of storage -- they are an entertainment industry client in Burbank, California. A lot of these guys are just shuffling along on external drives.

For them it’s often external arrays, and it's a lot more Mac OS users. They needed something that was better, and so hybrid object storage as a service has created a great opportunity for them and allows them to collaborate.

They have a location in Burbank, and then they brought up another office in the UK. There is yet another office for them coming up in Europe. The object storage approach allows a kind of central repository, an inexpensive place to place the data -- but it also allows them to be more collaborative as well.

Gardner: We have had a weak link in cloud computing storage, which has been the network -- and you solved some of those issues. You found a prime use-case with backup and archival, but it seems to me that given the storage capabilities that we've seen that this has extensibility. So where it might go next in terms of a storage-as-a service that hybrid cloud providers would use? Where can this go?

Carving up the network

Weise: It’s an interesting question because one of the challenges we have all faced in the world of cloud is we have virtualized servers and virtualized storage, meaning there is disaggregation; there is a separation between the workload that’s running and the actual hardware it’s running on.

In many cases, and for almost all clients in the mid-market, that level of virtualization has not occurred at the network level. We are still nailed to things. We are all tied down to the cable, to the switch port, and to the human that can figure those things out. It’s not as flexible or as extensible as some of the other solutions that are out there.

In our case, when we build this out, the real magic is with the network. That improved connection might be a cost savings for a client -- especially from a bandwidth standpoint. But as you get a private cross-connect into that environment to make use of, in this case, storage as a service, we can now carve that up in a number of different ways and allow the client to use it for other things.

For example, if they want to have burst capability within the environments, they can have it -- and it’s on the same network as their existing system. So that’s where it gets really interesting: Instead of having to have complex virtual guest package configurations, and tiny networks, and dealing with some the routing of other pieces, you can literally treat our cloud environment as if it's a network cable thrown over the wall -- and it becomes just an extension of the existing network.

That opens up some additional possibilities. Some things to work on eventually would be block storage, file storage, right there existing on the same network. We can secure that traffic and ensure that there is high-performance, low-latency and complete separation of tenancy. So if you have Coke and Pepsi as clients, they will never see each other.

Gardner: Very cool. You can take this object storage benefit -- and by the way, the cost of that can be significantly lower because you don’t have egress charges and some of the other unfriendly aspects of economics of public cloud providers. But you also have an avenue into a true hybrid cloud environment, where you can move data but also burst workloads and manage that accordingly. Now, what about making this work toward a multi-cloud capability?

Transition to

HPE Data Center Networking

Weise: Right. So this is where HPE’s DCNsoftware-defined networking (SDN) really starts to shine and separates itself from the pack. We can tie environments together regardless of where they are. If there is a virtual endpoint or physical appliance; if it's at a remote location that can be deployed, which can act as a gateway -- that links everything together.

We can take a client network that's going from their environment into our environment, we can deploy a small virtual machine inside of a public cloud, and it will tie the networks together and allow them to treat it all as the same. The same policy enforcement engine and things that they use to segregate traffic in microsegmentation and service chaining can be done just as easily in the public cloud environment.

One of the reasons we went to Switch was because they have multiple locations. So in the case of our object storage, we deployed the objects across all three of their data center sites. So a single repository that’s written the data is distributed among three different regions. This protects against a possible regional outage that could mean data is inaccessible, and this is the kind of recent thing that we in the US have seen, where clients were down anywhere from 6 to 16 hours.

One big network, wherever you are

This eliminates that. But the nice thing is because of the network technology that theywere using from HPE, it allowed us to treat that all as one big network -- and we can carve that up and virtualize it. So clients inside of the data center -- maybe they need resources for disaster recovery or for additional backups or those things -- it's all part of that. We can tie-in from a network standpoint and regardless of where you want to exist -- if you are in Vegas, you may want to recover in Reno, or you may want to recover in Grand Rapids. We can make that network look exactly the same in your location.

You want to recover in AWS? You want to recover in Azure? We can tie it in that way, too. So it opens up these great possibilities that allows this true hybrid cloud -- and not as a completely separate entity.

Gardner: Very cool. Now there’s nothing wrong, of course, with Switch, but there are other fiber and data center folks out there. Some names that begin with “E” come to mind that you might want to drop in this and that should even increase the opportunity for distribution.

Weise: That’s right. So this initial deployment is focused on Switch, but we do a grand scheme to work this into other data centers. There are a handful of major data center operators out there, including the one that starts with an “E” along with another that starts with a “D.” We do have plans to expand this, or use this as a success use-case.

As this continues to grow, and we get some additional momentum and some good feedback, and really refine the offering to make sure we know exactly what everything needs to be, then we can work with those other data center providers.

From the data center operators’ perspective, if you're one of those facilities, you are at war with AWS or with Azure. Because whenever clients deploy their workloads in those public clouds, that means there is equipment that has not been collocated inside one of your facilities.

So they have a vested interest in doing this, and there is a benefit to the clients inside of those facilities too because they get to live inside of the ecosystem that exists within those data centers, and the private networks that they carry in there deliver the same benefits to all in that ecosystem.

We do plan to use this hybrid cloud object storage as a service capability as a model to deploy in several other data center environments. There is not only a private cloud, but also a multitenant private cloud that could be operative for clients that have a large enough need. You can talk about this in a multi-petabyte scale, or you talk about thousands of virtual machines. Then it's a question of should you do a private cloud deployment just for you? The same technology, fulfilling the same requirements, and the same solutions could still be used.

Partners in time

Gardner: It sounds like it makes sense, on the back of a napkin basis, for you and HPE to get together and brand something along these lines and go to market together with it.

Weise: It certainly does. We've had some great discussions with them. Actually there is a group that was popular in Europe that is now starting to take its growth here in US called Cloud28+.

We had some great discussions with them. We are going to be joining that, and it’s a great thing as well.

The goal is building out this sort of partner network, and working with HPE to do that has been extremely supportive. In addition to these crazy ideas, I also have a really crazy timeline for deployment. When we initially met with HPE and talked about what we wanted to do, they estimated that I should reserve about 6 to 8 weeks for planning and then another 1.5 months for deployment.

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I said, “Great we have 3 weeks to do the whole thing,” and everyone thought we were crazy. But we actually had it completed in a little over 2.5 weeks. So we have a huge amount of thanks to HPE, and to their technical services group who were able to assist us in getting this going extremely quickly.

Gardner: What's happening in the market with business and technology trends that’s driving this need for more modern factories and more responsive supply chains?

Hester: Our customers are demanding shorter lead times. There is a drive for even higher quality, especially in automotive manufacturing. We’re also seeing a much higher level of customization requests coming from our customers. So how can we create products that better match the unique needs of each customer?

Gardner: What is it about IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) that allows you to do things that you could not have done before?

Hester: Within the manufacturing space, a lot of data has been there for years; for decades. Manufacturing has been very good at collecting data. The challenges we've had, though, is bringing in that data in real-time, because the amount of data is so large. How can we act on that data quicker, not on a day-by-day basis or week-by-week basis, but actually on a minute-by-minute basis, or a second-by-second basis? And how do we take that data and contextualize it?

Hester

It's one thing in a manufacturing environment to say, “Okay, this machine is having a challenge.” But it’s another thing if I can say, “This machine is having a challenge, and in the context of the factory, here's how it's affecting downstream processes, and here's what we can do to mitigate those downstream challenges that we’re going to have.” That’s where IoT starts bringing us a lot of value.

The analytics, the real-time contextualization of that data that we’ve already had in the manufacturing area, is very helpful.

Gardner: So moving from what may have been a gather, batch, analyze, report process -- we’re now taking more discrete analysis opportunities and injecting that into a wider context of efficiency and productivity. So this is a fairly big change. This is not incremental; this is a step-change advancement, right?

A huge step-change

Hester: It’s a huge change for the market. It's a huge change for us at Hirotec. One of the things we like to talk about is what we jokingly call the Tuesday Morning Meeting. We talk about this idea that in the morning at a manufacturing facility, everyone gets together and talks about what happened yesterday, and what we can do today to make up for what happened yesterday.

Instead, now we’re making that huge step-change to say, “Why don't we get the data to the right people with the right context and let them make a decision so they can affect what's going on, instead of waiting until tomorrow to react to what's going on?” It’s a huge step-change. We’re really looking at it as how can we take small steps right away to get to that larger goal.

In manufacturing areas, there's been a lot of delay, confusion, and hesitancy to move forward because everyone sees the value, but it's this huge change, this huge project. At Hirotec, we’re taking more of a scaled approach, and saying let's start small, let’s scale up, let’s learn along the way, let's bring value back to the organization -- and that's helped us move very quickly.

Gardner: We’d like to hear more about that success story but in the meantime, tell us about Hirotec for those who don't know of it. What role do you play in the automotive industry, and how are you succeeding in your markets?

Hester: Hirotec is a large, tier-1 automotive supplier. What that means is we supply parts and systems directly to the automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), like Mazda, General Motors, FCA, Ford, and we specialize in door manufacturing, as well as exhaust system manufacturing. So every year we make about 8 million doors, 1.8 million exhaust systems, and we provide those systems mainly to Mazda and General Motors, but also we provide that expertise through tooling.

For example, if an automotive OEM would like Hirotec’s expertise in producing these parts, but they would like to produce them in-house, Hirotec has a tooling arm where we can provide that tooling for automotive manufacturing. It's an interesting strategy that allows us to take advantage of data both in our facilities, but then also work with our customers on the tooling side to provide those lessons learned and bring them value there as well.

Gardner: How big of a distribution are we talking about? How many factories, how many countries; what’s the scale here?

Hester: We are based in Hiroshima, Japan, but we’re actually in nine countries around the world, currently with 27 facilities. We have reached into all the major continents with automotive manufacturing: we’re in North America, we’re in Europe, we’re all throughout Asia, in China and India. We have a large global presence. Anywhere you find automotive manufacturing, we’re there supporting it.

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Gardner: With that massive scale, very small improvements can turn into very big benefits. Tell us why the opportunity in a manufacturing environment to eke out efficiency and productivity has such big payoffs.

Hester: So especially in manufacturing, what we find when we get to those large scales like you're alluding to is that a 1 percent or 2 percent improvement has huge financial benefits. And so the other thing is in manufacturing, especially automotive manufacturing, we tend to standardize our processes, and within Hirotec, we’ve done a great job of standardizing that world-class leadership in door manufacturing.

And so what we find is when we get improvements not only in IoT but anywhere in manufacturing, if we can get 1 percent or 2 percent, not only is that a huge financial benefit but because we standardized globally, we can move that to our other facilities very quickly, doubling down on that benefit.

Gardner: Well, clearly Hirotec sees this as something to really invest in, they’ve created the IoT Lab. Tell me a little bit about that and how that fits into this?

The IoT Lab works

Hester: The IoT Lab is a very exciting new group, it's part of our Advanced Engineering Center (AEC). The AEC is a group out of our global headquarters and this group is tasked with the five- to 10-year horizon. So they're able to work across all of our global organizations with tooling, with engineering, with production, with sales, and even our global operations groups. Our IoT group goes and finds solutions that can bring value anywhere in the organization through bringing in new technologies, new ideas, and new solutions.

And so we formed the IoT Lab to find how can we bring IoT-based solutions into the manufacturing space, into the tooling space, and how actually can those solutions not only help our manufacturing and tooling teams but also help our IT teams, our finance teams, and our sales teams.

Gardner: Let's dig back down a little bit into why IT, IoT and Operational Technology (OT) are into this step-change opportunity, looking for some significant benefits but being careful in how to institute that. What is required when you move to a more an IT-focused, a standard-platform approach -- across all the different systems -- that allows you to eke these great benefits?

Tell us about how IoT as a concept is working its way into the very edge of the factory floor.

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Hester: One of the things we’re seeing is that IT is beginning to meld, like you alluded to, with OT -- and there really isn't a distinction between OT and IT anymore. What we're finding is that we’re starting to get to these solution levels by working with partners such as PTC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to bring our IT group and our OT group all together within Hirotec and bring value to the organization.

What we find is there is no longer a need in OT that becomes a request for IT to support it, and also that IT has a need and so they go to OT for support. What we are finding is we have organizational needs, and we’re coming to the table together to make these changes. And that actually within itself is bringing even more value to the organization.

Instead of coming last-minute to the IT group and saying, “Hey, we need your support for all these different solutions, and we’ve already got everything set, and you are just here to put it in,” what we are seeing, is that they bring the expertise in, help us out upfront, and we’re finding better solutions because we are getting experts both from OT and IT together.

We are seeing this convergence of these two teams working on solutions to bring value. And they're really moving everything to the edge. So where everyone talks about cloud-based computing -- or maybe it’s in their data center -- where we are finding value is in bringing all of these solutions right out to the production line.

We are doing data collection right there, but we are also starting to do data analytics right at the production line level, where it can bring the best value in the fastest way.

Gardner: So it’s an auspicious time because just as you are seeking to do this, the providers of technology are creating micro data centers, and they are creating Edgeline converged systems, and they are looking at energy conservation so that they can do this in an affordable way -- and with storage models that can support this at a competitive price.

What is it about the way that IT is evolving and providing platforms and systems that has gotten you and The IoT Lab so excited?

Excitement at the edge

Hester: With IoT and IT platforms, originally to do the analytics, we had to go up to the cloud -- that was the only place where the compute power existed. Solution providers now are bringing that level of intelligence down to the edge. We’re hearing some exciting things from HPE on memory-driven computing, and that's huge for us because as we start doing these very complex analytics at the edge, we need that power, that horsepower, to run different applications at the same time at the production line. And something like memory-driven solutions helps us accomplish that.

It's one thing to have higher-performance computing, but another thing to gain edge computing that's proper for the factory environment. In a manufacturing environment it's not conducive to a standard servers, a standard rack where it needs dust protection and heat protection -- that doesn't exist in a manufacturing environment.

The other thing we're beginning to see with edge computing, that HPE provides with Edgeline products, is that we have computers that have high power, high ability to perform the analytics and data collection capabilities -- but they're also proper for the environment.

I don't need to build out a special protection unit with special temperature control, humidity control – all of which drives up energy costs, which drives up total costs. Instead, we’re able to run edge computing in the environment as it should be on its own, protected from what comes in a manufacturing environment -- and that's huge for us.

Gardner: They are engineering these systems now with such ruggedized micro facilities in mind. It's quite impressive that the very best of what a data center can do, can now be brought to the very worst types of environments. I'm sure we'll see more of that, and I am sure we'll see it get even smaller and more powerful.

Do you have any examples of where you have already been able to take IoT in the confluence of OT and IT to a point where you can demonstrate entirely new types of benefits? I know this is still early in the game, but it helps to demonstrate what you can do in terms of efficiency, productivity, and analytics. What are you getting when you do this well?

IoT insights save time and money

Hester: Taking the stepped strategy that we have, we actually started at Hirotec very small with only eight machines in North America and we were just looking to see if the machines are on, are they running, and even from there, we saw a value because all of a sudden we were getting that real-time contextualized insight into the whole facility. We then quickly moved over to one of our production facilities in Japan, where we have a brand-new robotic inspection system, and this system uses vision sensors, laser sensors, force sensors -- and it's actually inspecting exhaust systems before they leave the facility.

We very quickly implemented an IoT solution in that area, and all we did was we said, “Hey, we just want to get insight into the data, so we want to be able to see all these data points. Over 400 data points are created every inspection. We want to be able to see this data, compared in historical ways -- so let’s bring context to that data, and we want to provide it in real-time.”

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What we found from just those two projects very quickly is that we're bringing value to the organization because now our teams can go in and say, “Okay, the system is doing its job, it's inspecting things before they leave our facility to make sure our customers always get a high-quality product.” But now, we’re able to dive in and find different trends that we weren't able to see before because all we were doing is saying, “Okay, this system leaves the facility or this system doesn't.”

And so already just from that application, we’ve been able to find ways that our engineers can even increase the throughput and the reliability of the system because now they have these historical trends. They were able to do a root-cause analysis on some improvements that would have taken months of investigation; it was completed in less than a week for us.

And so that's a huge value -- not only in that my project costs go down but now I am able to impact the organization quicker, and that's the big thing that Hirotec is seeing. It’s one thing to talk about the financial cost of a project, or I can say, “Okay, here is the financial impact,” but what we are seeing is that we’re moving quicker.

And so, we're having long-term financial benefits because we’re able to react to things much faster. In this case, we’re able to reduce months of investigation down to a week. That means that when I implement my solution quicker, I'm now bringing that impact to the organization even faster, which has long-term benefits. We are already seeing those benefits today.

Gardner: You’ll obviously be able to improve quality, you’ll be able to reduce the time to improving that quality, gain predictive analytics in your operations, but also it sounds like you are going to gain metadata insights that you can take back into design for the next iteration of not only the design for the parts but the design for the tooling as well and even the operations around that. So that intelligence at the edge can be something that is a full lifecycle process, it goes right back to the very initiation of both the design and the tooling.

Data-driven design, decisions

Hester: Absolutely, and so, these solutions, they can't live in a silo. We're really starting to look at these ideas of what some people call the Digital Thread, the Digital Twin. We’re starting to understand what does that mean as you loop this data back to our engineering teams -- what kind of benefits can we see, how can we improve our processes, how can we drive out into the organization?

And one of the biggest things with IoT-based solutions is that they can't stay inside this box, where we talked about OT to IT, we are talking about manufacturing, engineering, these IoT solutions at their best, all they really do is bring these groups together and bring a whole organization together with more contextualized data to make better decisions faster.

And so, exactly to your point, as we are looping back, we’re able to start understanding the benefit we’re going to be seeing from bringing these teams together.

Gardner: One last point before we close out. It seems to me as well that at a macro level, this type of data insight and efficiency can be brought into the entire supply chain. As you're providing certain elements of an automobile, other suppliers are providing what they specialize in, too, and having that quality control and integration and reduced time-to-value or mean-time-to-resolution of the production issues, and so forth, can be applied at a macro level.

So how does the automotive supplier itself look at this when it can take into consideration all of its suppliers like Hirotec are doing?

Start small

Hester: It's a very early phase, so a lot of the suppliers are starting to understand what this means for them. There is definitely a macro benefit that the industry is going to see in five to 10 years. Suppliers now need to start small. One of my favorite pictures is a picture of the ocean and a guy holding a lighter. It [boiling the ocean] is not going to happen. So we see these huge macro benefits of where we’re going, but we have to start out somewhere.

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A lot of suppliers, what we’re recommending to them, is to do the same thing we did, just start small with a couple of machines, start getting that data visualized, start pulling that data into the organization. Once you do that, you start benefiting from the data, and then start finding new use-cases.

As these suppliers all start doing their own small projects and working together, I think that's when we are going to start to see the macro benefits but in about five to 10 years out in the industry.